Google's AI system inspired by romance novels, writes poetry

The art of conversation is one that not even all humans fully master. However, following feedback from users that Google’s artificial intelligence system, dubbed “Parsey McParseface,” came across as stilted and unnatural, despite (or possibly due in part to) its perfect grammar, engineers decided to teach the bot a few literary tricks. Lessons came in the form of 2,685 romance novels, fed into the neural network over several months. Why romance novels, and how did this lead to Parsey McParseface’s first poetry collection? In an interview with Buzzfeed News, leading Google software engineer Andrew Dai explained that the simple plot structure meant that the romance novel genre made a particularly effective learning tool: “Girl falls in love with boy, boy falls in love with a different girl. Romance tragedy.” If…